In the field of dentistry, the restoration of a patient's tooth or teeth generally includes the replacement of the natural tooth substance by an artificial substance. For larger restorations, pre-finished dental restorations or prostheses are commonly used to replace the tooth or teeth or at least part of those.
Ceramic materials are widely used for making high-quality dental restorations because of their good physical, aesthetic and biological properties. These restorations are often manufactured in automated processes, which typically include at least one or more of the steps of:                digitally capturing the shape of a patient's teeth, for example by scanning a model of the teeth or the actual teeth in the patient's mouth;        making a design of the restoration using computer-aided design (CAD) software; and        manufacturing the restoration from the design using a Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machine.In the manufacturing of dental restorations from ceramic materials various automated processes are established in practice. One common method includes the preparation of standardized blanks that subsequently can be used to machine individual dental restorations or precursors thereof by removing material from the blank. Except for providing such blank at a sufficient size suiting for a multiplicity of different types of dental restorations, the shape of the blank typically does not correlate with any individual shape of a tooth in patient's mouth.        
While such processes provide various advantages meanwhile so-called build-up processes have been proposed for making dental restorations. Such a build-up process typically allows building up an individual dental restoration in substantially its desired individual shape, generally by subsequently adding material to create that shape instead of providing an oversized standardized blank from which material is removed in a subsequent process.
Copending international patent application PCT/US2011/063357 describes such a build-up process and corresponding devices for making a dental restoration. Although a precursor of the dental restoration obtained by the process described may be oversized such oversize is eliminated by sintering of the precursor without substantially changing the shape except for generally three-dimensionally shrinking the shape of the precursor. Accordingly in the described process the shape of the oversized dental restoration precursor correlates to the final shape of the final dental restoration.
Although existing processes for making dental restoration are advantageous in different respects there is a general desire to provide a process for making individual or customized dental restorations at a high degree of automation, maximized quality and minimized costs.